David Bowie, once the benchmark against whom pop's creativity was judged, has embraced bootlegging, offering up his back catalogue online to be remixed in a showdown of bedroom boffins the world over. As is often the case when Bowie expresses an interest, it is likely to be the phenomenon's death knell. (See also his drum'n'bass album, Earthling, which killed the genre off in one easy stroke.)
The bootleg has long been part of pop's inventive trajectory. In the late 80s, the very first superstar DJ, Sasha, used to bring his Saturday night set at The Hacienda to a searing climax by running the vocal track of Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance with Somebody over the instrumental of The Associates' noir pop gem, Party Fears Two. Inventive DJs throughout the rave era would copy the trick, using soulful vocal tracks over unconnected, bleepy instrumentals to hip-swivelling effect.
At the start of the new millennium, this technique reared its head again with the work of unassuming beat scientists Girls On Top and Soulwax, who would conjoin two unrelated tracks like Lego, becoming twice the fun for everyone.
It wasn't long before the practice became a recognisable commercial force. American girl group TLC co-opted a little-heard bootleg of their album track, Unpretty, with Dennis Edwards' terrace casual anthem, Don't Look Any Further, for a b-side. Sugababes rescued their entire career with Freak Like Me, an old Girls On Top bootleg of Adina Howard and Gary Numan, with its original producer Richard X at the helm. The music channels MTV and Q regularly feature their own in-house cut-ups of tracks. Soulwax sold more than a million copies of their jaunty 2 Many DJs album, though disco snobs dismissed the project as club culture's very own Jive Bunny, surely the unfashionable godfather of all this mash-up madness.
Brian Burton, a west coast production spod calling himself Dangermouse, has caused legal ripples through the music industry this year by conjoining the music from the Beatles White album to the lyrical flow of Jay-Z's The Black Album, dubbing the ambitious project The Grey Album. Geddit? More than a million downloaders did.
To consolidate his position as embarrassing uncle dancing at a wedding party, Bowie has missed the point of bootlegging. The software available on his website has made it possible only to download an old vocal over one of the instrumentals from his recent noddingly greeted Reality album. So Ziggy Stardust can only do battle with some ropey track in which no one was especially interested in the first place. The whole point of bootlegging is to double the recognition, not halve it.
As if things couldn't get more corporate, not only is Dame David attempting to resurrect a forgotten album by embracing an underground manoeuvre that has long since crossed over to the mainstream, but the whole thing is sponsored by Apple, who are making the winning track available for download at its iTunes stores. The winner will receive a paltry £6,000 worth of equipment. This is little compensation for having to sit through the whole of Reality.